Jorge Rafaél Videla of Argentina. Screen grab/The Guardian Representative government has been a luxury that relatively few people have enjoyed throughout human history.

And while the vast majority of dictators fall short of Hitler- or Stalin-like levels of cruelty, history is rife with oppressors, war criminals, sadists, sociopaths, and morally complacent individuals who ended up as unelected heads of government — to the tragic detriment of the people and societies they ruled.

What followed was a devastating conflict in which an overmatched Lopez conscripted child soldiers, executed hundreds of his deputies (including his own brother), incurred steep territorial losses, and triggered an eight-year Argentine military occupation.

Döme Sztójay (Hungary, 1944)

Döme Sztójay.
Wikipedia

Hungarian leader Miklós Horthy had been an ally of Nazi Germany, collaborating with Adolf Hitler's regime in exchange for assistance in restoring Hungarian control over lands the country had lost as a result of World War I.

Horthy began attempting to chart an independent path from the Nazis as the German war effort flagged in 1944 and largely refused to deport the country's Jews — triggering a Nazi invasion and Döme Sztójay's installation as the country's puppet leader even while Horthy officially remained in power.

Ante Pavelić (1941-1945)

After Yugoslavia's king declared himself dictator in 1929, Pavelić fled the country in order to organize an ultra-nationalist movement called Ustaše.

The Ustaše was dedicated to creating an independent Croatia, and sometimes resorted to terrorism. Ultimately, the group assassinated King Alexander in 1934.

After Axis forces took over Yugoslavia in the 1941, Pavelić took control as the head of the Independent State of Croatia (or NDH).

The country was nominally ruled by the Ustaše, but was essentially a puppet state of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. Under Pavelić's leadership, the regime persecuted Orthodox Serbs, Jews, and Romani living in the NDH.

After Germany was defeated in 1945, Pavelić went into hiding, and eventually escaped to Argentina. He died in Spain in 1959.

Rákosi managed to stick around for a bit, until the USSR officially decided he was a liability.

Moscow removed him from power in 1956 in order to appease the Yugoslav leader, Mashal Tito.

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Khorloogiin Choibalsan (Mongolia, 1930s-1952)

Khorloogiin Choibalsan.
Wikipedia

After several meetings with Stalin, Choibalsan adopted the Soviet leader's policies and methods and applied them to Mongolia.

He created a dictatorial system, suppressing the opposition and killing tens of thousands of people.

Later in the 1930s, he "began to arrest and kill leading workers in the party, government, and various social organizations in addition to army officers, intellectuals, and other faithful workers," according to a report published in 1968 cited in the Historical Dictionary of Mongolia.

In late 1951, Choibalsan went to Moscow in order to receive treatment for kidney cancer. He died the following year.

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Enver Hoxha (Albania, 1944-1985)

Enver Hoxha.
Wikipedia

Albania's communist dictator feuded with both the Soviet Union and China before promoting a ruinous policy of national self-reliance that turned his country into a Balkan version of modern-day North Korea.

Ian Smith (Rhodesia, 1964-1979)

Ian Smith.
Screen grab/The Guardian

One of the most controversial figures in post-colonial African history, Ian Smith, a decorated fighter pilot during World War II, led the secession of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) from the British empire in 1965.

Although whites were less than 4% of Rhodesia's population, Smith's government survived nearly 15 years of international isolation and civil war.

He agreed to a power-sharing accord that elevated Robert Mugabe to prime minister in 1980.

Although sometimes lauded for his willingness to surrender power — something that meant Rhodesia was liberated from minority rule some 15 years before neighboring South Africa — he still led a racially discriminatory regime for well over a decade.

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Ramfis Trujillo (Dominican Republic, May 1961-October 1961)

Ramfis's father, the more infamous Rafael Trujillo, ruled the Dominican Republic for over 30 years.

His oldest son, who was made a colonel at the age of 4, only spent a few months as the Caribbean nation's dictator — but he used them to mount a brutal reprisal campaign against those he suspected of assassinating his father on May 30, 1960.

An " accomplished torturer" and inveterate playboy, when Ramfis left the Dominican Republic by yacht to go into exile in Spain in late 1961, he reportedly took his father's coffin with him.

In March 1971, Khan ordered his army to crack down on a burgeoning separatist movement in Eastern Pakistan.

"Operation Searchlight" targeted Bengali nationalists and intellectuals and produced a wave of 10 million refugees that convinced India to intervene in Pakistan's civil war, setting the stage for Bangladesh's independence from Pakistan the following year.

During a high-level meeting in February 1971, Khan was recorded saying to "kill three million of them," in reference to the separatists and their supporters.

By the end of the year, hundreds of thousands of people were dead — and Khan had been deposed as president and sent into internal exile. He died in Pakistan in 1980.

Jorge Rafael Videla (Argentina, 1976-1981)

Military officer Jorge Rafaél Videla took over Argentina during a coup d'état in 1976.

At the time, the country was straddled with a corrupt government and a battered economy, and was "besieged by attacks from guerrillas and death squads," with many Argentines "welcoming Videla's move, hoping the three-man military junta would put an end to the violence," according to Biography.com.

Videla tried to bring back economic growth via free-market reforms, and was "moderately successful." However, he closed the courts and gave legislative powers to a nine-man military commission.

His government conducted a notorious "'dirty war,' during which thousands of people considered to be subversive threats were abducted, detained and murdered," among them intellectuals, journalists, and educators.

The official estimate of people killed during his presidency is 9,000, but some sources believe the number is between 15,000 and 30,000.

He was sentenced to life in prison in 1985, but pardoned in 1990. He was once again put on trial in 2010, and received another life sentence. He died in prison in 2013.

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Francisco Macías Nguema (Equatorial Guinea, 1968-1979)

Francisco Macías Nguema.
Wikipedia

The first president of Equatorial Guinea was a paranoid kleptocrat who declared himself leader for life, kept much of the national treasury in suitcases under his bed, and killed or exiled an estimated one-third of the former Spanish colony's population of 300,000.

Nguema's hatred of his country's educated classes led to comparisons with Cambodia's Pol Pot.

Extensive forced-labor programs brought to mind other historical cruelties as well: One visitor to the country during Nguema's rule described it as "the concentration camp of Africa — a cottage-industry Dachau."

Nguema was executed after his nephew, Teodoro Obiang, overthrew him in a 1979 coup.

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Teodoro Obiang (Equatorial Guinea, 1979-present)

Teodoro Obiang.
Wikipedia

Teodoro Obiang overthrew his uncle Francisco Macías Nguema, the first president of Equatorial Guinea, in 1979.

In 1995, oil was discovered in Equatorial Guinea, which provided Obiang with an almost limitless means of self-enrichment.

Theodore Sindikubwabo (Rwanda, April 1994-July 1994)

Theodore Sindikubwabo bears little personal responsibility for the organization of the Rwandan genocide, which was largely the project of hardline army officers and government officials like Theoneste Bagasora.

But when Rwandan president Juvenal Habyrimana's plane was shot down on April 6, 1994, Sindikubwabo was the man that the genocide's architects selected as Rwanda's head of state.

The former pediatrician was the official head of a government that perpetrated the slaughter of an estimated 800,000 people.

Far from attempting to stop the bloodbath, Sindikubwabo appeared in Cayahinda, Rwanda, on April 20, 1994, to "to thank and encourage" militants carrying out the genocide, and to "promise he would send soldiers to help local people finish killing the Tutsi who were barricaded" in a local church, according to Human Rights Watch.

Sindikubwabo fled into neighboring Zaire after the forces of current Rwandan president Paul Kagame invaded the country during the closing days of the genocide.

Than Shwe (Myanmar, 1992-2011)

Than Shwe was the leader of the ruling military junta in Myanmar (Burma) and had been criticized and sanctioned by Western countries for human-rights abuses.

Up to 1 million people were reportedly sent to "satellite zones" and "labor camps" under his rule.

There was virtually no free speech in the country, and "owning a computer modern or fax [was] illegal, and anyone talking to a foreign journalist [was] at risk of torture or jail," the Guardian reported in 2007.

Although Shwe stepped down in 2011, The Wall Street Journal reports that he "still exerts considerable leverage behind the scenes."

Most recently, he pledged support to his former foe, Aung San Suu Kyi, as the Myanmar's "future leader" — even though during his rule, the country's Nobel Prize-winning opposition leader was kept under house arrest.

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Isaias Afwerki (Eritrea, 1991-present)

Isaias Afwerki.
Wikipedia

Eritrea won its independence from Ethiopia in 1991 partly because of President Isaias Afwerki's leadership in the armed struggle against Ethiopia's brutal communist regime, which he helped overthrow.

Over the next 25 years, Afwerki built one of the world's most terrorizing dictatorships.

Eritrea's internal oppression has led to over 380,000 people fleeing out of a population of less than 7 million — despite the lack of active armed conflict in the country.

Afwerki's foreign policy has been equally problematic.

A 1998 dispute with Ethiopia over the demarcation of the countries' border quickly escalated into the last full-scale interstate war of the 20th century, with Afwerki bearing at least partial blame for failing to defuse a conflict in which an estimated 100,000 people were killed.